What Is Happening: Line Drawings, So Many Line Drawings

I was in Maine and Connecticut for various reasons last week, so I’ve saved up a fair number of drawings and things that I haven’t posted on here yet. Also, I’m launching a new regular comic tomorrow BUT because it is launching tomorrow and I have all this unposted stuff, blah blah blah I’m going to go ahead and wait till tomorrow to talk about that.

So here’s what I’ve been up to.

1. Final Fantasy Legend III PaletteSwap: An artist who does really awesome things, Rusty Shackles, invited me to submit to his PaletteSwap blog, on which artists reinterpret videogame cover art. I did three, all of which are going to be posted this week! It is exciting. Here’s the first one:
final-fantasy-legend-3
And you should go check out the whole blog, because it is full of excellent videogame-related art. Oh! And you can buy an art print of the one above, if you’re interested!

2. Content-aware studies: I’ve been planning on doing a series of non-comic-related paintings based on the weird deformations that sometimes happen in Photoshop when you use the “content-aware” fill tool.

content-aware-1

Basically, the content-aware fill is for if you have like… Okay say you have a picture of the sky with a bunch of clouds, and there’s a smudge or a bird or something in the middle of one of them, and you don’t want it there. You can select that area and use content-aware fill on it, and that should “smart” fill it, so it will look seamless and like the bird/smudge was never there and it was always just a sky full of clouds.

That may have been a needlessly complicated explanation. Anyway the point is that sometimes the content-aware tool glitches, and if it does so near an image of a person, sometimes it can get really weird and creepy and gruesome.

content-aware-2

So I have a bunch of these content-aware deformations saved, and eventually I plan on painting them. The two sketches above are just studies! And they are the first I’ve done.

3. Final Fantasy IX’s Lindblum: Final Fantasy IX is my favorite game of all time. (I wrote about it a whole bunch in Manic Pixel Dream Girl 2, if you missed it!) I’ve done a lot of drawings of things from FF9, but my favorite thing to draw is the game’s largest city, Lindblum.

Here’s a study I sketched last week, for another one of the alternate cover arts I did:
lindblum

And, for comparison I guess, here’s a little painting I did of Lindblum like two years ago:

lindblum-small_o

That was from way before I’d become comfortable with my current painting process. I think I actually used gouache, which is WAY too expensive to use regularly. Now I use acrylic, very very watered down. Also I’m a lot less afraid of putting in lots of details now, just because I’m more practiced. For example, the line drawing above I drew in one go with a pen, over the course of an hour or two. The painting I did in like a hundred steps… Pencil, pen, paint, like 3 more layers of paint, then pen again. And as you can see, even after all those steps, it’s still less detailed and the architecture is a bit off.

I like the colors though. One of the first paintings I ever did that I was REALLY happy with, so even though it’s easy to criticize in retrospect, I still kinda like it.

4. Trees on Lake Pemaquid: No, you’re not going to escape my post-Maine blogpost without some drawings of Maine. I drew some trees over a lake. In context, and then just some random trees there at the bottom.

trees

Okay, that’s it for now! Big announcement about a new comic, coming tomorrow! :)

What Is Happening: Hands & Feet & Tentacles Edition

A couple days ago I finally finished Manic Pixel Dream Girl 3, so at least until the next intense deadline I’m all yours, People Who Read My Blog.

Oh, MPDG 3 is going to be published next week, and I will post about it here when that happens! In the meantime, here’s what else I’ve been working on in what little spare time I’ve had. Enjoy!

0. Retronauts Kickstarter Prize!!!: Okay so this isn’t really something I’ve been WORKING ON (which is why I’m numbering it 0), but it’s an announcement I’d like to make anyway. Retronauts is a podcast about old videogames, and it is amazing and brilliant and informative and I’ve been listening to it since 2006 (really!). Unfortunately, Retronauts is now without a home because its parent site, 1up.com, has been shut down.

So Retronauts launched a Kickstarter to continue the podcast, and it has already been funded several times over. “WHY POST ABOUT IT NOW, THEN?!” you may be asking. Well, the Retronauts guys have added a bunch of “stretch goals,” things they will do if they reach certain levels of funding. (For example: At $42,000, which they’ve already reached, they will do two 24-hour livestreams for charity.) And, because they were funded so much more quickly than they expected, they’ve also had to add a whole bunch of new prizes for backers.

MY POINT: At the $250 funding level, backers can choose to receive custom videogame fanart from one of a number of artists, including me! I don’t expect many people reading this will want to drop $250 on Retronauts (though everyone should; they are really a wonderful group of talented people doing an awesome thing), but sharing the Kickstarter or checking out the podcast if you like old videogames does just as much good. And, on the off-chance that you want some custom art by me AND want to donate $250 to a good cause, you can’t go wrong here. ;)

Now on to the drawings…

1. Hands: Sometime in the last week or so, I managed to extricate myself from the grasp of Manic Pixel Dream Girl and go outside and take a walk in the park near my apartment. I sat down on a bench for awhile and watched people walk or run or bike past me, and I tried to draw their hands as quickly as I could.

Hands are easy to draw, but very difficult to draw WELL. And there are certain hand positions that are really really common (hanging loose by one’s side; holding a cellphone; holding a water bottle or glass; gesturing while talking) that aren’t super intuitive to draw. Or else I’ll have some idea in my head of what they look like, but that idea is actually pretty far from reality. So I think looking at and drawing an endless parade of hands was a helpful exercise. Here are most of the fruits of my labors:

hands

2. Feet: Oh, and feet are fucking impossible to draw; I’m absolutely terrible at them. I plan on doing a similar outing where I just draw feet in the near future, but I’m a bit scared to be honest because good god do I have a hard time with feet. Eventually I will stop being a coward, but for now here are my own feet from when I was sitting on the bench drawing hands. I’m actually happy with how they came out:

feet

3. Final Fantasy Legend III alternate boxart: One of my fellow Retronauts-volunteer artists, Rusty Shackles, has a blog-project called PaletteSwap, at which he invites artists to submit reinterpretations of videogame boxart. He alerted me to its existence and I think it’s a really awesome idea, so I spent yesterday working on a painting of a new design for the boxart of Final Fantasy Legend III, one of the first RPGs I ever played as a kid. (I wrote a bit about it in MPDG1.)

Rusty prefers that his artists not post their entries on their own blogs until they run on PaletteSwap, and mine will run in two weeks (I’ll post the final version here at that point), so I’ll show you my concept drawings instead for now:

ffl3

 

This is hopefully just the first of a few of these I’ll do, all centering on an iconic or slightly-overlooked-but-should-be-iconic monster or villain from an RPG. For FF Legend III, I chose to show Xagor, the game’s final boss, in a battle with the Talon, the game’s signature time-travelling airship. I have plans for a couple other games like FF7, FF9, Chrono Cross, and probably some others that are slipping my mind at the moment.

And that’s about it for this post! Next on my list of projects to work on like a crazy person: Finally finishing Lost In Hong Kong. Have a good weekend!

What Is Happening: Gears & Gals Edition

Now that I’m doing art full-time, I am (not-surprisingly) drawing A LOT. So I think I’m going to do a regular feature on this blog just kind of taking you through some snippets of what I’ve been doing, maybe every other day or so. May I present to you the first of hopefully many such posts. Enjoy!

1. Elements of Steampunk: For this thing I’m working on, there are a few parts that rely heavily on the steampunk aesthetic, so I’ve been doodling steampunk visual elements to get a hang of them. I am definitely not like “into” steampunk at all, and I often actually dislike it, but daaaamn is it fun to draw:
steampunk-elements
2. Julia: I also am finally happy with one of the primary character designs (not steampunk!!) for that same secret project. Below, meet Julia:

julia-sketches
She’s wearing chunky heels on the right, but she’ll usually be wearing flat lace-up “booties.” God I hate that word. What I mean is, you know, ankle-high boots. Can I just say that instead?

3. 20-minute Nude Sketch: Moving on… Today I started taking a life-drawing class at the Art Students League, which I’ll be doing two mornings a week to keep those particular muscles warm. Here’s my favorite thing I did in today’s class:

20-minute nude
I drew the outlines freehand with pen, and did the shading with compressed charcoal. It was a 20-minute pose.

More soon!